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I was reading something from a right-wing source (Hillsdale’s Imprimis). Although right-wing, it’s very ‘mainstream’ in the neocon sense. The author, Christopher Caldwell, was talking about Russia in terms of Vladimir Putin and those who came before him. He spoke of oligarchs and kleptocracy. I found it amusing.

He might as well have been talking about the United States. Neoconservatism is all about oligarchy and kleptocracy. It is what our country was founded upon, especially since the coup we call the Constitutional Convention when the oligarchs unconstitutionally abolished the Articles of Confederation. The entire history of America, even back to the colonial era, was constant theft of land from Native Americans and theft of lives from forced servitude. America has never been free of oligarchy and kleptocracy.

The Articles of Confederation was the closest America ever came to a democratic political system. Yet even under it, most people were oppressed and powerless. But at least it decentralized power allowing the possibility for the common people to fight back. And indeed they did fight back, which is why the oligarchs made sure to create a stronger centralized government with the Constitutional Convention. This gave the federal government power of both direct taxation and a standing army, removing nearly all leverage of influence and resistance from local government, as the Anti-Federalists predicted would happen.

The neocon writing the article certainly knows this history. On some level, I suspect most Americans grasp the basic reality of the situation, in how entrenched it is and how long it has existed. But it’s what we can’t talk about out in the open. For public debate in respectable society, it is taboo and politically incorrect to point out any of this. It is an open secret that must not be uttered.

I guess it’s good that I’m not part of respectable society. Like most Americans, there is little risk that my words will be heard or have any effect on the machinations of concentrated wealth and power. I can speak freely because I don’t matter, not to those who control the social order. And if I ever did start to matter, they could squash me like a bug and few would take notice.

Eventually, though, enough people who don’t matter can combine their voices. Then suddenly they matter in a way that can’t so easily be stopped or suppressed. I like to think of myself as a termite, slowly gnawing away at the structure upholding political evil. It’s delicious! There are many other termites doing the same. Join in. It’s a feast!

“Chief among the common misconceptions about the way official propaganda works is the notion that its goal is to deceive the public into believing things that are not “the truth” (that Trump is a Russian agent, for example, or that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, or that the terrorists hate us for our freedom, et cetera). However, while official propagandists are definitely pleased if anyone actually believes whatever lies they are selling, deception is not their primary aim.

“The primary aim of official propaganda is to generate an “official narrative” that can be mindlessly repeated by the ruling classes and those who support and identify with them. This official narrative does not have to make sense, or to stand up to any sort of serious scrutiny. Its factualness is not the point. The point is to draw a Maginot line, a defensive ideological boundary, between “the truth” as defined by the ruling classes and any other “truth” that contradicts their narrative.”
~ C.J. Hopkins

I came across an article from Hillsdale, a right-wing college that has come under the influence of neoconservatives. It is How Intelligence Works, in which Herbert Meyer asks and answers:

“So why has our intelligence service suffered so many failures during the last decade or so, losing the trust of so many? Because it’s been run by career bureaucrats and administrators who rose to the top by managing intelligence rather than actually doing it.”

Neocons aren’t actually against bureaucracy, obviously. They just want the right kind of bureaucracy. If anything, they want to turn everything into bureaucracy, an entire society bureaucratized, both public and private sectors.

When I read something like this, it comes off sounding like propaganda to me. It’s what the ruling elite put out to influence opinion. But it’s too simpleminded to be the actual opinion of the ruling elite. The Imprimis publication is respected on the political right. It is one of the sources that helps set the agenda across the Republican Party, right-wing think tanks, and right-wing media.

Read as propaganda, it is fascinating, partly because it is propaganda directed at the well educated upper classes. It makes you wonder what is the goal of their agenda. It seems to be neoconservatism of an extremely aggressive variety. Trump’s placing military figures in political positions is the kind of thing that is probably the hoped for end result. It is the militarization of all aspects of society, from federal agencies to the local police, since the military like the CIA is the bureaucratic to the core, one of the least democratically accountable parts of government.

This piece isn’t just about the CIA. It is creating a vision for how the entire deep state should operate. The purpose is to eliminate the bureaucracy which really means eliminating what little democratic proceduralism might exist. In its place, powerful leaders are to be made decision-makers, a concentrating of authority and control. It is a top-down model of command and control.

Interestingly, there is a critical piece from the Lew Rockwell site, A Warmonger’s Guide to Militarism and Imperialism. It is also right-wing, although of a more radical fringe variety. It is written by Thomas DiLorenzo, a bit of a kook, but he offers maybe useful perspective. What stood out to me is that apparently Imprimis was started by Lew Rockwell, an anti-statist, which makes it interesting that it has become a mouthpiece of statism.

“The Claremont Institute neocons claim to be “the” experts on the U.S. Constitution, with their educational arm now being Hillsdale College, run by former Claremont Institute president Larry Arnn. They hold an annual “Constitution Day” event in Washington, D.C., with this year’s featured speaker being Senator Cotton, who spoke on the subject of foreign policy and the Constitution. The senator’s speech is published in the recent issue of Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College (a publication started by Lew Rockwell when he worked at Hillsdale, long before the neocon takeover). The speech is a textbook example of how the “Straussians,” who claim to have special knowledge of “the real meaning” of America’s historical documents (which is often dramatically different from the literal and historical meaning) distort history in the service of statism and militarism.”